Last night I upgraded to Cross Over Office 4.2, the latest release being a smidging over a week old.

I had bought 4.1 on the basis that it could let me use the excellent iTunes and its store. Unfortunately back then I found that the usability was sketchy at best; broken playback and absurd loading times.

Everything has changed with this latest release (the 6 months of free updates having come in handy) as I'm pleased to say that right now I'm listening to clear and uninterupted music I bought from the iTunes Store.

It's still not perfect but it's comfortably, indeed pleasurably, usable. To briefly go over what annoyances remain, there is still a warning window at iTunes' startup stating that the drivers for the optical drive aren't usable, there is still a distinct but easily bearable slowness in performing most actions, I find the window-in-window effect inconvenient as the program can only be minimised from the inner window and the Wine-Systray clutters up the taskbar and desktop. Minor stuff really.

Reports differ about using iPods succesfully but I really couldn't tell you.

How are other people finding Cross Over's abilities? Is there a lot of variability between distro and/or desktop? (FC3 + Gnome)

Obviously with the WINE project having existed for so long and with the commercial backing of Code Weavers and Transgaming there is a wealth of skill and resources available to bring programs over from Windows. I am however curious if, if we assume that apple won't ship a GNU/Linux native version, porting from the open source Darwin (Mac OS X) might not provide more stable long term results.

Does anyone know of any projects which are attempting to port from Darwin? Any thoughts on why we aren't seeing software suites which have a large mac following appearing on Linux?

As far as software suites that have a large mac following being ported to linux would go, it must be remembered that a lot of the most popular app's for mac are proprietary:-
Adobe have yet to make a Linux version of photoshop, (probably because they fear competition from projects like the GIMP) Microsoft would have to go through massive board room changes if it were to release a copy of MS Office for linux, (or any other software for that matter),
Apple I suppose could be encouraged to release a port of iLife, and maybe even the apple works package for linux, but it would take a lot of encouragement.

To be honest, the only reason that I still keep a Windows machine around is to use iTunes (and Counter Strike: Source . I've tried running iTunes under the latest version of Crossover but thought it was pretty rubbish: in essence I was trying to emulate the Windows version of a Mac OS X app on a Linux box. Pretty scary.